the edwardian time warp

you’d think, since i spot certain things with my family, i could avoid falling into the trappings of such things…

…but, no.

i don’t recall my mom or grandmother doing it, but my sister and my uncle are both very guilty of not, for lack of a better term, being able to recognize and/or acknowledge that a large amount of time has passed. so, for example, when we cleaned out grandma’s house my uncle would want to save something that was of no used to any of us and had to resale or even pawnable value because “my mother paid good money for that and it’s still useful”.

for what? how much money? and how fucking long ago? how many stars were on the flag? how many germany’s were there?

he used to bring up stories of us as small kids as a way of knowing “we would never order…” something in a restaurant. never mind the era of the stories, where our age would be a single digit, might not ring true now that we were in our thirties or forties at the time he was telling it. in his eyes, you were that way at six, you’re that way at forty-two.

likewise, my sister will talk about how she still has the right to stuff in my fucking house because “it was mom’s house”, ignoring the fact that she’s been gone since 1996, i’ve paid the taxes and such on it for the last twenty-five years, and it’s been my house LONGER than it was our mom’s house. uncle arthur still refers to “his mother’s house” when speaking of the property we sold back in 2010, a fucking decade ago.

and then there’s the recent struggle we’re having with household plumbing (keep in mind this was written in the midst of it and before a professional came out about a week ago)and i was remarking to the ufc how it was causing me to lose sleep because “i’ve always been able to fix this” and she pointed out that, at some point, things would get bad enough for a professional to be needed and that “quite frankly, the fact you’ve kept it going this long with no professional assistance is pretty fucking impressive” and given that it’s been almost twenty years since i had one out, i guess she’s pretty right.

i just didn’t realize it had been twenty years until i really thought about it – which i guess is the time curse i get from mom’s side of the family, the edwards.

(see, now the title makes sense)